Interview: Avatar Composer James Horner says James Cameron has Four Sequel Scripts Completed

Titanic Live kicked off its tour with a sold-out event at the Royal Albert Hall last night, attended by composer James Horner, producer Jon Landau and director James Cameron. The score was played by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra with a 40 piece choir, conducted by Ludwig Wicki.

This morning we spoke to producer Jon Landau and composer James Horner about the endurance of Titanic and the forthcoming Avatar films.

As well as his work on James Cameron’s 1997 epic our conversation with Horner drifted to the world of Pandora, and how his work on the forthcoming Avatar sequels is coming along.

Recently the production of the next Avatar films was pushed back until 2017, and reports singled out Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver, and Shane Salerno as writing Avatars 2, 3 and 4 respectively.

The updates we received today from Horner and Landau is that James Cameron has completed scripts for a further four Avatar films and is currently working on condensing them to fit the original plan of three sequels.

He’s got four sequels script-wise, and he’s trying to make it into three. And I think that’s where the effort is going right now […] how do you keep it from expanding into a fifth movie?

Here’s the video (full interview below)

Our full conversation with Horner is below.

In January of this year Cameron told AP,

There’s a layer of complexity in getting the story to work as a saga across three films that you don’t get when you’re making a stand-alone film,

We’re writing three simultaneously. And we’ve done that so that everything tracks throughout the three films. We’re not just going to do one and then make up another one and another one after that.

So far we know that Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang are set to return, the latter duo being killed off in the first film. There was considerable surprise that Cameron was looking to take us back to Pandora for another three films. Are we looking at a potential fifth film?

We also talked about working with Cameron, and his particular musical preferences for the world of Avatar. We also asked Horner if there was a chance that we might follow our characters back to Earth, he neither confirms, nor denies…

The full interview is below,

Our full interview with Producer Jon Landau will be up shortly. You can find out more about film screenings with live music at the Royal Albert Hall’s website, look out for the unmissable Breakfast at Tiffany’s in June.

Father and writer. In gutter, looking at stars.
Movie quotes I live my life by: 'Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while - you might miss it.' 'Carpe Diem!' 'When somebody asks you if you're a God - you say YES!'